1. Clearly the project was not proceeding well. What approach would you have taken to address the fundamental problems with the project?
2. Mr. Zhang asked for your thoughts on the potential of closing the project versus keep going to fix the system. What are your recommendations and the pros and cons of each?

As Mr. Zhang reflected on the past experiences, even though he readily agreed that there was insufficient planning and organizing at the Ideation, Initiation, and Preparation Phases from March through June 2010, the problem really started in the Implementation Phase. Perhaps, it was a lack of adequate project management preparation that led to all the problems, but he still shuddered remembering the many missed deadlines and complications.

For example, he vividly recalled a management meeting with his senior staff when the initial testing results failed to meet expectation. The Quality Assurance team reported a passing rate of 90% across the 2,000 test scripts, most of which was automated. What was detrimental was that of the 200 failed scripts, nearly 25% of them were in high severity categories - meaning that that the system would stop functioning and manual workaround must be found. The team recommended an additional round of system testing to improve the testing before moving into the next phase of testing with users. But it would also slip the schedule by nearly a month. Mr. Zhang, eager to push ahead, urged the team to reject the extra testing and head into the next phase of testing. Mr. Zhang thought that any additional errors could be found and addressed there. With great hesitancy, the other execu- tives followed his lead. To his great relief, the next phase of testing with the users proceeded better than the expected. But shortly after the launch, the problems dis- covered earlier came back to haunt the new ERP system. In hindsight, the user test- ing was probably inadequate and failed to capture some key problems. At the worst moment, which occurred in week 4 after launch in October 2011, the incident man- agement system was registered over 100 incidents per hour, completely overwhelm- ing the team's ability to even review them. After 3 months of constant fires, resulting in some major errors on customer orders and departure of several high-performing employees, Mr. Zhang eventually ordered to restart the old processes and systems